Northern Paiute History Project Paper Collection
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NORTHERN PAIUTE HISTORY PROJECT PAPER COLLECTION UNIVERSITY OF OREGON HONORS COLLEGE COURSE 2014 HC 444 DECOLONIZING RESEARCH: THE NORTHERN PAIUTE HISTORY PROJECT ©Soo Hwang; Kimi Lerner; Jan Raether; Simone Smith; Madeline Weissman Northern Paiute History Project Paper Collection 2014 University of Oregon Honors College Course Student Papers Introduction Is it with the deepest honor that the course instructors, Kevin Hatfield and Jennifer O’Neal, and Visiting Scholar James Gardner, share this collection of five student research papers from the fall 2013 University of Oregon Honors College course “Race and Ethnicity in the American West: The Cultural History of the Northern Great Basin” with our Northern Paiute community partners from Warm Springs and Burns. Soo Hwang, Kimi Lerner, Jan Raether, Simone Smith, and Madeline Weissman exemplified the community‐based, intercultural, decolonizing philosophy of the course. Following the high aspirations of the course instructors, the students’ original research combined oral history and archival materials, to contribute new knowledge to the field of Northern Paiute history. The generous collaboration and tribal knowledge of the community partners—Wilson Wewa, Myra Johnson‐Orange, Julie Johnson, Ruth Lewis, Randall Lewis, and Valerie Switzler— ensured that the student exploration of Northern Paiute history honors and reflects Native American perspectives and research protocols. We wish to reaffirm our gratitude for our community partners’ dedication to the class, students, and the history of the Northern Paiute people—their knowledge and involvement ensured the success of the course and enriched and deepened the students’ scholarship. We designed a learning environment for the course that intentionally reached beyond the traditional history classroom and instruction. One of the many thinkers inspiring the pedagogy of the course was Eva Marie Garroutte and her concept of “Radical Indigenism” articulated in her book: Real Indians: Identity and Survival of Native America. Garroutte contends: By asking scholars to enter (rather than merely study) tribal philosophies, Radical Indigenism asks them to abandon any notion that mainstream academic philosophies, interpretations, and approaches based upon them are, in principle, superior. The demand that researchers enter tribal philosophies cannot stand by itself. If the adoption of those philosophies is to be something more than mere appropriation and exploitation of Native cultures, it must be accompanied by researchers entering tribal relations. Entering tribal relations implies maintaining respect for community values in the search for knowledge. This respect is much more than an attitude, it requires real commitments and real sacrifices on the part of those who practice it. The course also incorporated the methodological insights and wisdom of Linda Tuhiwai Smith. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples Smith asserts: Indigenous methodologies tend to approach cultural protocols, values and behaviours as an integral part of methodology. They are ‘factors’ to be built into research explicitly, to be thought about reflexively, to be declared openly as part of the research design, to be discussed as part of the final results of a study and to be disseminated back to the people in culturally appropriate ways and in a language that can be understood. This does not preclude writing for academic publications but is simply part of an ethical and respectful approach. There are diverse ways of disseminating knowledge and of ensuring that research reaches the people who have helped make it. Two important ways not always address by scientific research are to do with ‘reporting back’ to the people and ‘sharing knowledge’. Both ways assume a principle of reciprocity and feedback. With this ethical framework in mind, the instructors explored how historically the educational system, and often particularly the writing and teaching of history, has functioned as a site of oppression, assimilation, and ethnocide controlled by dominant culture voices and misrepresentations. Consequently, the students examined how the course research projects could challenge triumphalist, military, and imperial paradigms, and avoid functioning as an act of appropriation or neo‐colonialism—in other words the practice of extracting, alienating, and distributing knowledge for uses and purposes external to the indigenous source community. Rather, we wanted the students to understand the importance of their work to the tribal communities, the role it fills in the scholarship, and then as a form of reciprocity, share the papers with the course partners and larger tribal communities. The development of the course began in 2012 with the decade‐long research of James Gardner on Northern Paiute history and his longstanding relationships with Wilson Wewa, Minerva Soucie, and Northern Paiute tribal elders and community 2 members. Drawing from Gardner’s research and in collaboration with several tribal community partners, a list of approximately 30 research questions was collectively generated for the 19 students to choose from for their research. James shared customized coursed summaries of his forthcoming books, Oregon Apocalypse: The Hidden History of the Northern Paiutes and Legends of the Northern Paiute as told by Wilson Wewa, as well as 30 original maps illustrating the natural and cultural geography and history of the Northern Paiute and Northern Great Basin. These research questions, and the broader themes of identity, sovereignty, self‐determination, resistance, rights, and restoration encompassing them, held particular meaning for our community partners. We also established a protocol for shared decision‐making about research agendas, modes of inquiry, categories of analysis, dissemination of knowledge, and philosophies of scholarship. These research protocols confronted the dichotomy between the authorized “academic expert” and the “subordinated subject,” and worked in good faith in the challenging and promising enterprise of intercultural exploration and the seminal research insights it may yield. Based on this set of research questions, we devoted several months to identifying and assembling primary source collections for the students’ research. Gardner shared his personal library of books, maps, and manuscripts with the class, and explored with students their individual research projects and writing. Kevin spent several days at the National Archives in Seattle Washington in August 2013 researching materials housed in the Malheur, Warm Springs, and Yakima Agency Records, and the files of the Oregon Superintendency of Indian Affairs files, and digitized about 2,200 pages of documents and photographs. Kevin also conferred with colleagues at the National Archives in Seattle to make an exception to their loaning policy, and allow the class to house about 40 reels of microfilm at the UO Libraries for the entire term. During their research students digitized several hundred pages of materials from these microfilm rolls. Jennifer culled the vast primary and secondary source collections at the University of Oregon Libraries’ Special Collection and University Archives and identified numerous collections for use in the students’ research papers. Most recently, in August 2014, Jennifer devoted two days of research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. in the Warm Spring records, and digitized over 2,500 pages of additional materials available only at this location. Jennifer continues the development of a comprehensive annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources on Northern Paiute History, including manuscript collections (e.g. correspondence, reports, diaries, memoirs, court records, treaties, photographs); rare books; journal articles; historic newspapers; thesis and dissertations; microfilm series; and original maps. Jennifer and Kevin also continue to develop two websites to facilitate the Northern Paiute History Project and the sharing of knowledge, sources, and research. The UO Libraries website (scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/18228) functions as a digital archive for the ongoing collection and dissemination of source materials and student work, whereas the course website (blogs.uoregon.edu/hc444f13hatfield/) serves as a portal of communication and interaction between the students and community partners, and hosts the following resources: ● Biographies of all Course Community Partners ● Field Research Itinerary ● Photographs from Fall 2013 Course ● Suggested Research Topics List ● Student Research Topics from Fall 2013 ● Primary Source Guides and Maps ● Fall 2013 Student Spotlights ● Northern Paiute Primary Source Annotated Bibliography The centerpiece of the fall 2013 course and ongoing research project revolved around the sustained interactions between the students, experienced instructors, researchers, and tribal and community partners. The Fall 2013 course received $5,000 in funding from the Robert D. Clark Honors College, the Carlton and Wilberta Ripley Savage Endowment, and Department of History, as well as generous in‐kind contributions from Ranch at the Canyons, James Gardner, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Des Chutes County Historical Museum to support our three‐day research trip to central Oregon and to host community partners and visiting scholars such as James Gardner, Myra Johnson‐Orange, and Valerie Switzler on campus. The students also conferred with course partners throughout the course as